Recart: SMS & List Growth

We moved over to Recart almost a year ago and took our barely skating by SMS program to a whole new level. The support they provide is fantastic and their constant testing and iterations on the pop up has driven opt-ins as high as 13%. Our list size has grown by leaps and bounds and every campaign is a money maker. I recommend them to everyone who will listen! Fantastic app, fantastic service, and crazy good metrics.

BEWARE, WE LOST MONEY WITH RECART - READ THIS BEFORE YOU SIGN AN AGREEMENT.

$10,000+ lost in revenue with Recart due to platform bugs.

My experience with Recart has been disappointing due to their platform filled with many bugs, declining performance, lack of promised support, strategy, billing discrepancies, and failure to execute agreed-upon tasks.

The app and the service has not only failed to deliver on its promises but has also negatively impacted our revenue and business operations.

Read my experience below. You will thank me later. Let me explain.



Prior to moving to Recart in March 2024 I was using Postscript for 4+ years and generated seven digits in sms revenue by managing it in-house.

So i know the technical side, strategy, optimizations and how things should work if you know what you are doing, and if the platform works as intended or not.

I decided to move to Recart to save time and because they promised (via email and on their website) they will handle EVERYTHING: strategy, execution, optimizations, AI tests, A/B tests and will match our custom price. It sounded amazing, I was like it can’t be that bad, like what can they mess up, so I pulled the trigger and signed an agreement. Oh boy, was I wrong. 



PLATFORM BUGS - lost $10,000+ in revenue due to browse, add to cart, checkout abandonment flows not working as good as they work on Postscript. The worst part, I had to escalate and ping their team many times, so finally after few months they “discovered” the bug and apparently fixed it but still it was NOT working as it should. I know this from a fact, when we were for 4+ years with Postscript I would get hit by abandonment flow message almost every week. So my guess is their technology for recognizing users and events is not up to the level compared to Postscript and on the top of that it’s has bugs that they are not even aware of.

So if you use Recart you are losing money on these automated flows because the users are not triggering the Recart events and/or they can’t recognize the users.



POOR SERVICE - be careful, it’s not what’s advertised, at least it was not for us, their CEO Soma confirmed that there was misunderstanding in the offered service, so basically misleading advertising. I was like why you did not tell me this before? if you sign an agreement ask for detailed scope of work and deliverables along with the cadence. I made a huge mistake of signing an agreement that was super vague and gave them chance to not delivered what was promised. Also depends who is your assigned account manger, and also depends how much you are spending, low spend you are getting minimal support and non US rep.

I was also told I’m asking a lot of questions and I’m taking up a lot of their time to address my concerns.



NON TRANSPARENT PRICING - there is no way to figure out the charges, applied credits, sms usage, from the platform UI, it’s NOT transparent, even their team has hard time understanding the billing, credits, roll over credits etc it’s all a black box. You can’t verify it yourself. They acknowledge it it’s not transparent.



HIDDEN OVERCHARGES - after complaining about their non transparent charges and being unable to verify myself why I was charged the amounts, they told me they are refunding me money because they apparently discovered an issue with roll over credits or whatever it was.

Imagine If I was not doing my due diligence, no one would have discovered the issue.

So now imagine how many of the brands that use Recart were potentially impacted by the same issue and the bugs I have discovered?

Incorrect Attribution and Inflated Metrics - We had agreed on a specific 1-day click attribution model to track performance accurately. Despite multiple confirmations, Recart applied a different attribution model, inflating performance metrics for several months. The issue was only corrected after I escalated it on June 3rd, meaning all prior data was unreliable.

Lack of Reporting and Strategic Support - there was a period of 2+ months where we haven't received any performance reports, there was a noticeable absence of strategic guidance and poor execution. We haven't had any strategy sessions or received proactive recommendations for over two months, leaving us without direction in our SMS marketing efforts.

Billing Discrepancies - Our contract clearly stated a rate of $0.0075 per message, but we've been consistently billed at approximately $0.0077 per message. While this might seem minor per message, over thousands of messages, it results in significant overcharges, violating our agreed payment terms.

Other promised services that were not delivered: Incorrect URLs in Campaigns: Despite clear instructions and agreements, campaigns went out with incorrect URLs, confusing customers and potentially losing sales. Scheduled Campaigns Not Sent: Planned campaigns were missed, leading to lost revenue opportunities. Flows Not Reactivated: Critical flows weren't updated to reflect current offers, rendering them ineffective. Abandonment Flows Malfunctioning: For over six months, I didn't receive any browser, checkout, or add-to-cart abandonment SMS messages, indicating these flows weren't functioning properly. No A/B Testing: We were promised proactive A/B pop-up testing and AI-driven personalization, but these initiatives were never implemented.

Gave them 2 stars, because they were kinda trying to make things right but mostly because they finally agreed to terminate the agreement with no penalty, however the damage is done, they are aware of it, and they still owe me $5,000+ due to the automations not working properly.

As soon as I moved back to Postscript I made more revenue with the abandonment automations in 3 days than Recart abandonment automations generated in 7+ months. That’s how bad their platform and technology is.

They should also compensate me for the time I spent discovering all the crucial bugs and issues on their platform.

Using Recart has been a huge advantage for our company! So glad we chose to switch over to this app.

Terrible customer service. Soma, the CEO, has no better customer skills. If I could have left zero stars, I would have.

UPDATE TO THE CEO'S RESPONSE:

Yes, while I do agree that there were billing issues and appreciate the fact that Recart was working with us and we had entered an agreement with you.
What can't be dismissed is the Alice Pai, your head of client success, is and was extremely rude and condesending to us from the very begining. So much so that we had to call her out on in some of the emails, which I will gladly share with anyone that wants to read them.
What also can't be dismissed is that Recart had entered into an agreement with us to which they did not fullfill. Instead what Alice did was nothing. Because Alice couldn't do her job, what she did was run up our bill over $3000 dollars and then expected US to pay it off completely "or else".
Then you Soma, the CEO, got involved. You again said we need to pay the full balance or you would suspend our account. Again, a balance your company ran up because YOU failed to honor the agreement. I offered a payment arrangement to which you declined and suspended my account before a weekend. I could not send text to my customers for the weekend which cost me sales. Then on the following Monday, you decided you would accept my payment arrangements. YOU suspended my account for the weekend to intentionally hurt my business. Then when you decided to re-activate my account, my number NEVER got verified. I couldn't send a text for an entire week! All this while I was trying to get away from your company. It took less than a day for the new company to get my number verified. My guess, the number was never submitted by your company to get verified. Another intentional act on your part to hurt my company. So did I get a little upset with your company and send some emails telling you how I felt about Alice....I sure did! Were some of those on the unprofessional side, yes. But YOUR actions, caused my reaction. Alice is far from professional and you SOMA, not taking responsibility for your company failures and trying to put it on my company and then intentionally hurting my company and family.....take a look in the mirror. This would have NEVER happened if you and your company had any integrity and did what they said they were gong to do.

Anyone reading this, please feel free to reach out and ask for emails. I will gladly send them to you. This company has gone downhill drastically since we had signed on with them. If you don't do what they demand, they will hurt you. ALSO, you DO NOT HAVE IMMEDIATE ACCESS TO THE CONTACTS THEY COLLECT FOR YOU. You have to request your contact list and then they will get it to you, when they can. You pay for them to collect that data, you should immediate access to your property.

I am really excited to learn everything about this app, love that it keep track of extra sales!